Robert Frost

"They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars—on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places."

Robert Frost

Gabriel García Márquez

"Perhaps this is what the stories meant when they called somebody heartsick. Your heart and your stomach and your whole insides felt empty and hollow and aching."

Gabriel García Márquez (Collected Stories)

Richard Laymon

"Except I think it feels more like an empty stomach than a broken heart. An aching hollowness that food can't cure. You know. You've felt it yourself, I bet. You hurt all the time, you're restless, you can't think straight, you sort of wish you were dead but what you really want is for everything to be the same as it was when you were still with him ..."

Richard Laymon (Night in the Lonesome October)

T.S. Eliot

"We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;"

T.S. Eliot

Nicole Krauss

"He was gone, and all that was left was the space you'd grown around him, like a tree that grows around a fence. For a long time, it remained hollow. Years, maybe. And when at last it was filled again, you knew that the new love you felt for a man would have been impossible without him. If it weren't for him, there would never have been an empty space, or the need to fill it."

Nicole Krauss

Gabriel García Márquez

"Perhaps this is what the stories meant when they called somebody heartsick. Your heart and your stomach and your whole insides felt empty and hollow and aching."

Gabriel García Márquez

Ayn Rand

"I regret nothing. There have been things I missed, but I ask no questions, because I have loved it, such as it has been, even the moments of emptiness, even the unanswered-and that I loved, that is the unanswered in my life."

Ayn Rand

Joss Whedon

"Passion. It lies in all of us. Sleeping ... waiting ... and though unwanted, unbidden, it will stir ... open its jaws and howl. It speaks to us ... guides us. Passion rules us all. And we obey. What other choice do we have? Passion is the source of our finest moments. The joy of love ... the clarity of hatred ... the ecstasy of grief. It hurts sometimes more than we can bear. If we could live without passion, maybe we'd know some kind of peace. But we would be hollow. Empty rooms, shuttered and dank. Without passion, we'd be truly dead."

Joss Whedon

Colm Tóibín

"..Some of our loves and attachments are elemental and beyond our choosing, and for that very reason they come spiced with pain and regret and need and hollowness and a feeling as close to anger as I will ever be able to imagine. "

Colm Tóibín